Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,70

is hard for those who lived through it to remember and those who came after to imagine. In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because it’s too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room. Myriad forms of injustice became visible in ways that made it seem normal to recognize them and easy to forget by what toil they became visible (which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see, and for what failings future eras will rebuke us). The evolution of feminism makes some of the formerly nameless unrecognizability of many kinds of discrimination hard to recall, though that is one measure of the difference between then and now.

There were epic public changes that make the era of my youth a foreign country, one in which I no longer live and which the young will never visit, and most will never know how different it was and why it changed and who to thank. My own life metamorphosed by degrees I would only perceive in retrospect. I was almost friendless, and the friends I had made as a teenager and in my early twenties were mostly bad fits; perhaps it was because I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be someone else and so I didn’t know who was like me or who liked me. Or because kindness was not a criterion. Then later in my twenties I made friends who have lasted, and then some more, and then that sense of being on the far edge alone became a sense of being on the borderlands between various realms, so that I began to have the pleasure of bringing ideas, projects, and people from one circle to another, and the lack and loneliness were gone.

I went through a phase of approaching the powers that I had assumed were not for me and maybe not for my gender. I bought a motorcycle at the beginning of the 1990s, and revving the engine and kick-starting it and moving its weight to park it or bring it back upright or pick it up when it got knocked over gave me a kind of macho pleasure (more than riding it, which I always found a little scary, because of cars, before it was stolen nine months after I bought it). I learned to work out with weights and weight machines shortly thereafter, having finally noticed that the body requires maintenance and that the stress that petrified my form yielded at least temporarily to violent exertion.

Two or three years later, the boyfriend who lived in the Mojave taught me to shoot a .22 rifle—we went out into the desert and aimed at Old English malt liquor cans late one beautiful afternoon until evening came and our shadows stretched for a hundred feet and more across the flat ground. I found it alarmingly fun, though when we went shooting with his father, who’d spent his life in the military and a lot of time in combat, he told me the story of being forced by a general’s direct orders to shoot a civilian on a hill a long way away—and how he had nightmares ever after. It was a solemn and graceful warning to take guns seriously. And I studied Shotokan karate for a little while with a world champion fighter who feared nothing when she walked down the street. Just to shout and kick and strike required a different sense of self. Each of these felt like a little usurpation of powers that I had once believed were not for people like me. Things were changing.

Street harassment largely ceased to be a problem, and my wariness softened, though it never went away. It was not a science experiment with a control, so it’s hard to say what exactly changed. Perhaps I aged out of my prime target years. Perhaps the culture changed in some way, though I know young women still suffer street harassment and assault. Perhaps the ways I became street-smart were a factor: I learned how to give those I encountered respect and acknowledgment, and to not get caught up in anyone else’s drama—to be fluid on the street, moving smoothly without snagging or rushing. White men fell silent. The commentary from the black men in my neighborhood grew uniformly cordial, as some